Shazia Imran, a Christian woman, was kidnapped, raped and killed by four Muslim men because she refused to convert to Islam and marry a man who had set his eyes on her.
Mani Gujjar is the main suspect in the death of the 40-year-old Christian widow. After failing to get her to do what he wanted, he and others gang-raped her and, after killing her, tried to destroy her body with acid.
Shazia worked at a day-care centre at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where she first met the man who now stands accused of her death.
On 6 June, when she did not return from work, her family searched for the mother of three – two boys, Salman (16) and Abrar (6), and one daughter, Aliza (7) – without success.
The next day, they went to the police to file a report, concerned because Shazia and her family were convinced that her husband was beaten to death 18 months earlier, not by “thugs”, as the police asserted, but by the same people who killed Shazia.
Physical attacks and rape have been used countless times as coercive methods of conversion, above all, against women from religious minorities in Pakistan.
Shazia’s case, her rape and murder for refusing to convert, have sparked a new wave of fear but also anger and protests among the country’s Catholic minority.
Her relatives say that she had told her sister-in-law about Mani Gujjar’s harassment and attempts to get her to convert and marry him.
So far police have arrested only one of the four suspects, Mani Gujjar himself; his brother and two cousins, who allegedly participated in the crime, are still at large.
Joseph Jansen, president of Voice of Justice, said he was concerned about the incident, and urged the authorities to take strong action against the perpetrators.
For Jansen, whose NGO provides legal counsel through Pakistan’s first digital legal portal, the persecution of religious minorities needs to be curbed as soon as possible.

More than 3,000 Catholics including bishops, priests, and laypeople in Cambodia participated in a Mass to commemorate clergy, religious, and laypeople who were martyred by the Pol Pot regime in the seventies.
The event was held in Tang Kork District, Kampong Thom Province, about 100 kilometres from the capital Phnom Penh on June 17, Catholic Cambodia reported.
During the program, church officials called the martyrs the “fathers” of today’s Catholic community in Cambodia.
“The testimony of the martyrs guides us along the way” Bishop Olivier Schmitthaeusler, the Apostolic Vicar of Phnom Penh and an MEP missionary, said during the program.
Enrique Figaredo Alvargonzález, the apostolic prefect of Battambang, Pierre Suon Hangly the apostolic prefect of Kompong-Cham, priests, nuns, and laity attended the Mass in remembrance of the “Cambodian Martyrs.”

On mission in a very poor area of western Nepal. With a big dream that is taking its first steps: that of opening a school in Dhangadhi to give a future to the children of those living in this extreme periphery at the foot of the Himalayas.
This is the missionary frontier of Fr. Ajo Thelappilly, an Indian Catholic priest of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate (CMI), coordinator of the social works of Nepal Carmel Mata Samaj, an NGO that has been active in Nepal as part of the mission that this religious institute opened in the country for a decade.
“We arrived on March 22, 2011,” Fr. Thelappilly recounts, “at the request of Msgr. Anthony Sharma, a Jesuit who was Nepal’s first local bishop and later died in 2015. We belong to the St. John’s province of our institute, which has missions outside our home country as well as in northern India. Currently here in Nepal we are six missionaries active in four different missions: Punarbas and Parasan in Kan-chanpur district and in Dhangadhi and Phulwari in Kailali district, all in the westernmost part of the country.”
Compared to the capital Kathmandu these are much more underdeveloped areas of Nepal.
“The inhabitants belong mainly to the Magar, Chhetri, and Tharu groups known for their ancient traditions and culture ,” Fr. Ajo continues. ”Agriculture provides them with a basic livelihood, but in local markets for their products they earn very little. Occasionally, then, the region receives heavy rains and subsequent flooding, which makes life even more difficult. There are also landless people who are completely dependent on daily work in neighboring India or in Dhangadhi, the most important city in the area. Most of their children work in hotels and markets as child laborers.”

The Christian community “is at great risk” and still reeling from the quake of 6 February. Amid “great desperation”, only a handful of Christians are left in places like Antakya (Antioch), the core of the devastation, this according to Bishop Paolo Bizzeti, vicar of Anatolia.
In Turkey’s quake-ravaged regions, everything has to be rebuilt from scratch – homes, schools, jobs – because, “other-wise, people will leave.” To avoid this, the vicariate met on 13-15 June in Iskenderun (Alexandretta) to discuss the situation and decide what to do in the coming weeks to deal.
“Christians are no different from other minorities,” Bishop Bizzeti said. “They are affected by the same problems like every-one else: housing, jobs, education, daily life, ordinary things. All this will take years to fix. Even today it is hard to say what can be done from the outside to help; the key point is to keep in mind that Christianity’s roots are in these places.’
For the prelate, “Western Churches should pressure on their governments and raise awareness so that they can help and contribute to the Christian presence in the Middle East. I’m talking about serious policies, to put on the agenda.”
The 7.7 earthquake remains an open wound in Turkey. The situation is still one of active emergency in 11 large areas in southern and south-eastern Turkey and in northern Syria.

Former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is accused of tampering with police records to obstruct investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he served as a military officer during a Marxist rebellion in 1989.
The charges are contained in a report entitled ‘Mass Graves and Failed Exhumations’ publish-ed by a number of activist groups: Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), Centre for Human Rights and Development (CHRD) and Families of the Disappeared (FoD).
“Witnesses to crimes are gradually disappearing: 178 mothers of missing persons have already died in recent years. We protest and fight for justice, not knowing when we will get it,” said Manuvel Uthayachandra, mother and president of Families of the Disappeared.
The paper highlights how successive Sri Lankan governments have interfered in the investigation of mass graves, pointing out that only 20 mass graves have been partially exhumed in the last 30 years and of over 550 bodies found almost none have been identified.
“None of Sri Lanka’s numerous commissions of enquiry have been mandated to examine the mass graves, while efforts to uncover the truth have been hampered,” says the paper, which focuses on the failure of investigations in Matale district in central Sri Lanka and Mannar town, located in Northern Province, where a mass grave was discovered in 2018.

Some Philippine government officials and politicians are opposed to a US request to temporarily host about 50,000 Afghan refugees before they are moved to the United States.
“While the proposed arrangement is humanitarian in nature, it will not involve the admission or hosting of Afghan refugees,” said the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs in a statement.
The request was presented in Manila back in October last year, this according to Jose Manuel “Babe” Romualdez, the Philippine ambassador to Washington and cousin of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who added that if the request is granted, the United States will cover all costs.
Speaking to the Senate, he noted that the people in question are not refugees, but former employees of the US government who will arrive in groups of about 1,000 people at a time.
After the Taliban came back to power on 15 August 2021, tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with the US military or media were evacuated to neighbouring Pakistan and other third countries where their applications for a US visa are being assessed. In total, about 150,000 are still pending after almost two years.
Pakistan had barred entry to US officials to conduct interviews with refugees and hindered the establishment of resettlement centres. Meanwhile, in the last 18 months, the residence permits of asylum seekers who had managed to obtain them have expired.
Without papers, Afghans cannot study or work and can be arbitrarily sent back to the border or arrested by local authorities, who often extort money from them.
Ambassador Romualdez explained that the United States simply asked for assistance in processing visas, which will be issued at a special facility in the Philippines.
While the Philippine government has stated that it is considering the proposal (a decision should be reached by mid-July), Senator Imee Marcos, sister of the president and head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has started a probe into the request, concerned that some refugees might spy for the Americans.
“During the past year, security and espionage threats have substantially increased because of the sharp escalation in tension between the rival superpowers,” she said.

Kazuko Nabeshima was born 70 years ago in Nomozaki at the southern tip of the Nagasaki Peninsula, a town now part of Nagasaki City. But was “never religious” despite her peninsula housing many churches.
She left Nagasaki after graduating from school to take up a job and lived for more than 30 years without any contact with a church. The turning point came some six years ago when her only daughter Yumi, who lived nearby, decided to move with her family to Okinawa.
“I knew little about Okinawa…But even though I didn’t know anything or have any connections there, I was excited about moving and I thought Okinawa was a good place.”
And, Yumi welcomed Nabeshima’s “desire to be part of her family.”
After the move, Yumi unexpectedly became a Protestant Christian and quit her job as a medical nurse to involve herself in church activities on weekends and holidays.
“I felt isolated as I couldn’t talk to my daughter. I was worried if it was alright to be so obsessed with religion,” Nabeshima said.

Students at a Bible school in China attended a study session on last year’s 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and were urged to pay respect to three Christian figures who became associates of the party, says a report.
The Shaanxi Bible School in north-western Shaanxi province, managed by the state-sanctioned Protestant church body, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), held the session on May 31, Bitter Winter magazine reported June 7.
The TSPM is known as a frontline organization promoting “Sinicization” – a favourite political ideology of the CCP that aims to impose communist principles on individuals and society.
During the session, the students studied the main speeches and conclusions of the CCP Congress held on Oct. 16-22 last year, in Beijing.
They watched videos of the congress and sang patriotic songs including the CCP’s favorite “Sing a Folk Song for the Par-ty,” Bitter Winter reported.
By singing patriotic songs, the students “expressed their love for the motherland and the CCP.”
During the session, the students were told to honour three revolutionaries, whose lives were narrated by three of its students.
Music composer, Ma Ke, medical doctor, Luo Jinwen, and Bishop Shen Zigao were known as supporters of the late communist leader and CCP chairman, Mao Zedong.
They are accused of betraying Christianity to become staunch supporters and associates of the CCP, according to Bitter Winter.
Ma Ke, raised in a Christian family, was an official music composer of the party for years. He is known for composing the CCP’s favourite revolutionary song “Nanniwan.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ordered local authorities to take suicide prevention measures after various media re-ports revealed families committed suicide due to hunger and poverty. Kim officially defined suicide as an “act of treason against socialism” and issued a confidential suicide prevention order during emergency meetings of the party leaders all over the country, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on June 5.
An unnamed official from North Hamgyong told RFA that the details of suicide cases shared during the meeting shocked the gathered officials.
“Our meeting was held at the provincial party committee’s building located in Pohang district, in the city of Chongjin,” the unnamed official said.
He further added that “the large number of suicide cases in the province was revealed and some officials… could not hide their anxious expressions.”
According to a South Korean National Intelligence Service report published in May, North Korea saw a 40 percent increase in suicide rates compared to last year, RFA reported.
“There are a lot of internal unrest factors in North Korea due to the hardships of people,” the agency also reported that violent crimes are also on the rise as people struggle to make ends meet. During a meeting in North Hamgyong, the officials revealed that there were 35 suicide cases this year in Chongjin and nearby Kyongsong county alone with many of the cases involving fami-lies ending their lives together.

The Indonesian government has decided to ease rules for building houses of worship, including churches, by initiating changes to a 17-year-old decree, considered a major barrier to such plans.
Religion Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas told law-makers on June 5 that the Joint Ministerial Decree of 2006 will be revised, doing away with the need for a recommendation from the Forums for Religious Harmony (Forum Kerukunan Umat Beragama, or FKUB), the main arbiter on issues regarding inter-faith ties.
According to current rules, a government license for building a place of worship can be obtained only by getting a set of recommendations, including one from the Muslim-dominated FKUB.
The change would mean the recommendation from represen-tatives of the ministry in the local government would be sufficient to construct a house of worship.
“Often, the more recommendations the more difficult it is,” said the minister, who is a cleric and member of Indonesia’s lar-gest moderate Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama.
“We can’t deny that,” the minister said of many proposals new houses of worship are rejected in the country.
“We can solve all problems if we start with honesty, especially being honest with our religion,” said the Muslim politician.
Andreas Harsono, a researcher from Human Rights Watch, said that “by removing permits for houses of worship from FKU-B, the government is actually returning the principle of freedom of religion, according to the 1945 Constitution, to Indonesia.”